Jul 14

Gold, gold, gold

by in Places we've been, Things we've seen

Kalgoorlie is all about gold. The history and the now is dependent upon gold. As a mining town it shows its gold lining – even the town hall dome is 24ct gold plated. There is obvious wealth although equally there is the poorer side. The famous Hay Street is down from 18 to just two brothels with just 4 ‘operatives’ now. Although our “madame” guide attributes the greater part of the demise to greater freedom in where ‘operatives’ can provide services (am I being sufficiently oblique) she did suggest that the services generally offered were no longer in great demand – something to do with the demise of standards in the general community.

There is a lot of history in this town too. We took the “Super Pit” Tour and learnt that our infamous Mr Alan Bond was responsible for consolidating a lot of mining leases in 1984 to create a single open cut mine. The evidence of the plethora of small mines is in the walls of the pit where the old tunnels and rail tracks have been exposed. The Super Pit goes down only 500 or so metres but some of the single hole mines go down as much as 1500 metres. Have a look at the photos of the ore trucks – they carry 220 tonnes of ore which will yield perhaps a golf ball of gold in one of 6 truck loads. No wonder gold is exclusive and expensive as this is and has been a relatively high yield mine. Our guide tells us that 300,000 tonnes of ore are moved daily and that will yield on average 51 kg of gold per 24 hour day.

I love the fact that these trucks cost $4.5 million each and a replacement tyre is 36K.

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The Super Pit is also something on a larger than life scale. Approximately 3.5 km long, 1.5 km wide and 0.5 km deep it is apparently one of the largest open cut gold mines in the world. It is spectacular……

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Kalgoorlie dates back to 1894 when gold was first found. Many of the old buildings were built shortly afterwards and display a grandiosity consistent with wealth….

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We can understand all of this but we found something incomprehensible further out of Kalgoorlie…..

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51 “insides” of Menzies locals, cast in alloy and spread all over the floor of the dry lake bed of Lake Ballard. Antony Gormley and some bureaucracy has a lot to answer for. This is 150km from anywhere except the near ghost town of Menzies where I’d be surprised if 51 people actually lived. It is a bit surprising though and we were amazed at how many people actually turned up to see while we were there…

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Back in town Jude found a tractor to play with but couldn’t work out how to climb up let alone see the drivers seat….

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and , no, you don’t get up here either…

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These are great toys – I reckon I could find gold at Lima East with a few of them.

Yes, we did the brothel tour but I’m not allowed to publish photos and there really was no ‘happy ending’! Bit disappointing really. But if you ask me nicely I can send I-phone sneakys but don’t expect anything voyeuristic. Could be any one of our bedrooms at home with me in it.

Also had to get permission to publish photos of the Super Pit – I guess photos of gold might get people excited and perhaps want to start digging. Back in the early days the gold was just lying around on the surface – I guess that would be a bit of a dead giveaway as to where one might start digging. But it ain’t so today (well at least we didn’t see any and Jude said she kicked over a lot of rocks).

We left Kalgoorlie on Tuesday 9 July and headed back to Norseman to pick up the Eyre Highway back east. There’s still lots to see.

For those interested in such things, our fuel economy has dropped to just 21.9 litres per 100km or for the technically challenged 12.83 mpg. It would want to. The price of fuel at Nullarbor Roadhouse was 203.9 c/l and for the Bobs of our association LPG was over 144.0.

We will report on the whale watching at Head of Bight next edition.

 

 

2 Responses to “Gold, gold, gold”

  1. From g@z:

    Big boys toys. Nanny doesn’t have to dug to get in that bucket!

    51K of gold a day is about $2 million, not bad but I wonder how much it costs to run those trucks. Maybe they get better mileage than the winny?

    There was a guy years ago that lived way up the road at Lima East that must have started looking for gold…. or maybe just mining for top soil. Truck load after truck load went past until someone dobbed him in as he didn’t have permission to do whatever he was doing. Dig carefully 🙂

    Regards,
    g@z.

    Posted on 14 July 2013 at 11:42 pm #
    • From g@z:

      err, that would be ‘duck’ 😉

      Regards,
      g@z.

      Posted on 14 July 2013 at 11:43 pm #

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